A digital video sequence can contain a very large amount of data. To transfer a video efficiently using current technology, a large transmission bandwidth is needed. However, data transmission bandwidth over a wireless medium is a limited and sometimes expensive resource.
For instance, Short Message Service (“SMS”), sometimes called “texting,” is one of the most popular person-to-person messaging technologies in use today. SMS functionality is widely available in almost all modern mobile phones. However, SMS has a very limited capacity to transmit information; each SMS message has a fixed length of 140 bytes or 160 characters and therefore is not suitable for transmitting video data. Multimedia messaging service (“MMS”) is a possible way to send messages that include multimedia content. However, MMS messaging cannot utilize existing SMS infrastructure, so it costs more than SMS messaging. It is difficult if not impossible to send a video message on very low bandwidth channels such as an SMS channel.